High-Capacity Double-Layer Data Hiding Technique Based on 3D Magic Cube

Information technology and the Internet have progressed rapidly in people’s lives, the privacy of information has become an important issue due to the accessibility of data. Therefore, to enhance information security and privacy protection, this paper proposes a new high-capacity method for data hiding. The proposed method is based on 3D magic cube with double layers embedding. In the field of data hiding, the reference matrix-based methods attract many researchers because of its high-capacity. Recently, as the needs of the high payloads of the stego-image, the multi-layers-based technique is applied to provide larger embedding capacity. However, the image after data embedding will cause serious distortions, especially on multi-layers embedding, hence, keeping the image at a good visual quality and achieving high-payloads are the main challenges for data hiding. In this scheme, we take advantage of 3D magic cube and 3D reference space with double layers embedding for our data hiding technique to improve the embedding payloads. The experimental results show that our method not only provides good embedding capacity (4.00 bpp) but also keeps the image at acceptable quality (In terms of PSNR > 30).